hey look what fell out of my cf card

We returned from Maui in 2006. April of 2006, actually. And we had a hard disk fail in the interim, and everything was stored on flickr. Furthermore, flickr would happily take the uploads of NEFs and just turn em straight into jpeg's. And we never really got to see how good some of them looked. So lately, we have had this MacPro with, uh, twelve (emphasis for my own shock, not bragging value) gigs of ram, so we can more or less run Photoshop and Bridge right next to eachother (and Logic and iTunes, too).

I do have a complaint about Bridge: it's single threaded. Or at least, behaves that way. When it has a folder with 225 images to thumbnail, it goes one by one. Folks, with twelve gigs of ram and eight procs, you don't gotta wait for the one to finish to start the next. Anyways.

I wanted to post some of these here, because they are not on flickr, and because they're the pictures of Maui you really don't see elsewhere. Everyone else posts pictures of beaches and surfers. We always go to Hawaii for different reasons. These are the things I remember.

Please do not redistribute these images. They're dramatically scaled down, and you may use them for personal use, but I don't even like the creative commons non-commercial-use license for these. I may someday turn a great deal of these into stock photos because these, and quite a few others, turned out just magnificently (and shame on us, we had no idea).

Also, these are the pictures the way they were taken. Some of the colors are incredibly beautiful and almost hard to believe. That's what got us to take the picture, believe me. Beyond telling Photoshop to "auto" level it (and sometimes not, as it seemed to drown out the colors for some photos) and sometimes opening (or closing) the exposure a little (which I think is fair), they haven't been altered, other than for their size. None have even been cropped or otherwise framed. This is Maui.

So, here is our Maui. Clicky the thumbs for beeger images:

Awwww, such a cute little mailserver.

thunder:~ alex$ telnet mail.rri-usa.org 25
Trying 206.230.62.68...
Connected to mail.rri-usa.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mail.rri-usa.org ESMTP Service (Lotus Domino Release 7.0.3) ready at Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:41:28 -0400


I never get tired of seeing this. Way to go, Mike and Paul. You're fucking winners.

It take all kinds

You know, I don't very often get people leaving comments that aren't worth posting, and the reason moderation of comments is on is simply the huge amount of spam I was getting before (and didn't notice!). Yet this morning, I got a comment from an angry man complaining that I'd been generally unkind to persons of a homosexual persuasion. I don't recall ever doing that, and I kinda perused through the things I've said over the years, and I don't recall ever saying anything that would have offended this particular homosexual, or homosexuals in general, but there you have it. Comment.reject();

I suppose in the future, Mr. "Independent Observer", I will be very careful to not offend anonymous homosexuals. If you care to leave an email address, or had left the comment non-anonymously, I might have even published it and a reply. But as it stands, I see it as equally hateful. I'm happy to clear up any disagreement we might have – I'm a nice guy – but this issue is really silly.

And, I don't think I've ever done anything to wrong you personally. So, maybe, just don't bother to take anonymous early morning potshots at me about silly little issues about which bolt goes in which hole, et cetera.

Yours,
alex

Your chance to host the Z!

The Z is being evicted by a man who is having some confusion about his soul. I'm frankly not sure I understand what goes into the reasoning of "You should stop the project because since the project isn't finished, finishing it is bad for you. I don't want you to overdo it by finishing it.", but that's what I've been given.

The Z does not leak any fluids as it has no engine. It needs four new tires, so it presently sits on three semi-inflated and one flat tire. It is a very small car, smaller than a Saturn Ion (I've parked the two next to eachother, I assure you, the Z is much smaller), and doesn't take up much space. It does however need to be covered because sheet metal of that era was so prone to rusting that exposure to rain and salt is enough to start ugly cancerous growths (and since this is a California car, there are actually only two places where it has rust requiring anything more than minor sanding).

So, if you've got a garage bay you're not using, or you think you might be able to fit it in nose-to-nuts or something, let me know. I'm not made of money, and I'd prefer gratis, of course, but I am willing to pay to keep my car safe. Just please, let's agree that you won't threaten to harm my car while it's in your garage.

Please, somebody, I know many of you who read this regularly have room for it, let me borrow a bay in your garage.